Amazon Echo Show 10 (3rd Gen) review: Alexa's got her eye on you

The rotating screen on Amazon’s latest smart display is the big attraction, but there’s plenty more to like about this excellent smart home hub.

The third-generation Amazon Echo Show 10 isn’t just Amazon’s best smart display, it’s the most innovative, the most sophisticated, and the best-sounding smart home hub ever. The brushless motor that almost silently spins its 10.1-inch HD display around a 350-degree arc is the feature that will grab your attention when you take it out of the box, but you’ll quickly discover many more things to get jazzed over when you set about exploiting its capabilities to the fullest.

Using feedback from its onboard 13-megapixel camera as well as from its far-field microphones, the Echo Show 10 rotates its display around its base so that it’s always facing you. This is a fantastic feature whether you’re following a recipe, engaging in a video call, or watching a movie on Netflix. And Amazon gives you full control over how motion occurs: You can disable it entirely, enable it only for some activities—such as when making video calls, watching a video, or following a recipe—or you can activate/deactivate it on demand by saying things like “Alexa, follow me,” “Alexa, turn right,” or “Alexa, turn off motion.”

The display apparently has a clutch or a similar mechanism that automatically disengages the motor while at rest, allowing you to manually turn the display left or right even if motion is enabled. Unlike previous iterations of the Echo Show, you can also tilt its display up or down to get the best viewing angle (this feature is not motorized)

Display quality is much improved on this model compared to the first- and second-generation Echo Show. It’s not only brighter, but Amazon has added the ability for the display to adjust its brightness and color to adapt to the ambient lighting in the room. Those are features Google has already made available in its competing Nest Hub Max.

I set up the Echo Show on my kitchen island and found that its tracking feature worked well and smoothly as it followed me moving around the room—provided there’s adequate ambient light. If the room is too dark, the Echo will display a message that reads “Motion is unavailable because lighting is low.” And while it can spin 175 degrees in each direction, it will reverse and rapidly swing the other way when it reaches the end of either range. This induced mild vertigo for the people on the other end of my video calls, but I don’t imagine there will be many times when you’ll go to the extreme of walking in circles around the display like I did.

Most of the time, you’ll be moving from side to side, and the Echo Show tracked those movements relatively well—unless there was someone else in the room moving in a different direction. It could then become confused over who it was supposed to track. Having one person speak to the display helps with this, since it uses both computer vision and sound to triangulate your location

While this review’s headline is accurate, you needn’t be too concerned about the privacy implications of the Echo Show 10’s ability to track your movements. There’s a MediaTek 8183 chip on board, but all the processing needed to accomplish the rotation trick is performed locally, on the device itself, using Amazon’s new AZ1 Neural Edge processor. No images or videos are uploaded to the cloud for this purpose. But if you still find that tracking feature disconcerting, you can slide a mechanical shutter over the camera’s lens. There’s also a button for disabling its onboard microphones.

Home security

In addition to streaming video from compatible third-party home security cameras, including those in the Amazon-owned Ring family, you can stream a live view from other Echo Shows in your home or those belonging to your contacts using Amazon’s Drop In feature (providing the appropriate permissions have been granted by the other parties). Enable Alexa Guard and the Echo Show will listen for the sound of smoke and carbon-dioxide detector alarms when you say “Alexa, I’m leaving.” If it detects those sounds, or the sound of breaking glass, Alexa will send an alert to your smartphone. Saying “Alexa, I’m home” when you return toggles Guard mode off.